Motorola confident on eve of split

SCHAUMBURG, Ill., Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Motorola Mobility Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Jha said Motorola Inc. made the right move splitting into two firms.

Mobile Mobility, which handles consumer products such as handheld phones and television set-top boxes, and Motorola Solutions, which focuses on devises for companies and the government, will be traded publicly as two companies starting Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune reported Monday.

"Our objective from the beginning was to create two independent, publicly traded, viable, substantially assetted companies so that we could both be successful in the marketplace," Jha said in an interview. "And to that extent, I think it looks as though we've done the right thing."

Separating Motorola Inc. after an 80-year run as one company was no easy task, he said, but, "We had quite a bit of time and we took deliberate care."

He said the concern throughout the process was to make sure the split-up erred on the side of creating two companies with product or service overlap, rather than companies that ended up with a gap between them.

In dividing assets, "Brand probably was the issue that took us the most amount of time to resolve," he said. "Not because anyone had a difference of opinion on the right thing to do, but (because) doing the right thing was difficult. There were areas of overlap between the two companies."